Some of you might have noticed, both in dictionaries and in publishing, the use of the diaeresis (pronounced dye-era-sis) to denote the second syllable of two adjacent like vowels. Thus, the word reelection is rendered reëlection, and the word cooptation becomes coöptation.

Lately, I've decided I like both the look and clarity of this diacritical mark. Substitutions within my own texts amount to nothing more than six conditional globals, but I've noticed that the change can introduce false-corresponding characters in certain fonts. Since I can only check the result against the e-readers I own or live with (Sony Readers, a Kindle and a Nook), I'd love to know whether the problem exists for other e-readers or if there's something I should do to create a standardized alternative. After all, the diaeresis does look identical to an umlaut.

What do you suggest? I love the specificity which the diaeresis affords the pronunciation of less-familiar words -- particularly the neologisms which I like to create.

And while we're on the subject, how do my fellow writers and formatters prefer to implement the use of relatively uncommon characters?

Ah, but I've never written for readers. I've always written for myself and a few close friends. I once won an award for a collection of stories I never expected anyone to read.

But to answer your question, the diaeresis is fairly common. See this blog entry and then read any article in the New Yorker afterward.

Still I read news sites of all levels on and off all day long (literally). I am in grad school so there is a ton of reading there at the scholarly level. I do not think I have ever see these marks like you mentioned. So I have a hard time believing they are common at all.

Still I read news sites of all levels on and off all day long (literally). I am in grad school so there is a ton of reading there at the scholarly level. I do not think I have ever see these marks like you mentioned. So I have a hard time believing they are common at all.

Have I missed something? You're talking about your experience of graduate school as central to common practice in publishing and dismissing the style sheet of a widely read American magazine as irrelevant.

With all due respect,

(1) grad school can involve light or difficult reading depending on the subject, teachers and institution (this is not a criticism of your reading history or the standards of your grad school),
(2) whether your reading is light or heavy, that's still in relation to your own experience and therefore inductive,
(3) even if you were right and your own experience equaled common practice, a temporary consensus does not equal ultimate practicality, nor does it cancel out exactitude, and
(4) I asked a question to which I'd like an answer and you seem to be blocking my request.

I understand that you've never seen a diaeresis before. What I don't accept is the assumption that, because you haven't encountered it yourself, a given diacritical mark shouldn't be important to anyone else.

Had you asked me about something which you found meaningful, I'd have tried to respect your question.

With all due respect,
<snip>
(3) I asked a question to which I'd like an answer and you seem to be blocking my request.
<snip>

My apologies, I did not mean to come across that way. I cannot come up with a way to continue a quest for understanding the desire to use a marker that is not common, and the New Yorker themselves says "The diaeresis is the single thing that readers of the letter-writing variety complain about most," with out sounding attacking (which I do not want to do) so I will drop it completely. I am sorry for any problem I have caused.

I realize that I have derailed your thread so ... getting back on track ...

My apologies, I did not mean to come across that way. I cannot come up with a way to continue a quest for understanding the desire to use a marker that is not common, and the New Yorker themselves says "The diaeresis is the single thing that readers of the letter-writing variety complain about most," with out sounding attacking (which I do not want to do) so I will drop it completely.

I don't mean to offend you either, but I feel I must comment on this.

While I appreciate your sentiment, the above response seems conflicted at best. If you were uninterested in having the last word on the relevance of my question, then why would you bother quoting the New Yorker in support of your previous point (and, again, making controversy the metonym of rarity)?

However, since I'd prefer to take you at your word, and a friend is far more valuable than a potentially irked forum member, let's move on, as you say.

Can you embed the font choice then? The letters are in the UTF-8 char set, so IMO any font that does not render them right is broken. Not that that matters.

Thanks for the additional verification. Yes, I did know it was used in UTF-8, and therefore in extended ASCII, but I don't want to overlook any omissions in any fonts which are commonly used on readers. One of the Sonys I checked does use fonts which were installed with the custom firmware and which don't seem to reproduce the mark I wish to include.

When I get home from work, I'll reformat the text I was checking and have a look at the offending fonts again. I'll even name names.

I am familiar with the diaresis, more common I think in British than American usage. The most common use I have seen is in "cooperation". I wouldn't use it myself in preparing an e-book, preferring "co-operation". However, if the original text uses it, what are you to do?

I just use the extended character set, select the vowel with the umlaut, and hope for the best. I'd be interested to see which character sets would produce a strange result.

Mind, I always use Calibri through clunky Microsoft Word, so I'm not sure this has been a problem to affect me.

I don't remember seeing those used either, but they're definitely in Unicode, and early enough to be supported by most readers. That's also how I use oddball characters, though, like when I had a character named Nyx Pi (spelled out since I'm on my tablet and don't know quite how to insert Unicode glyphs into posts on it). She was an engineered human; the first name was the model identifier and the second was usually their serial number in hex. Prototypes were given irrational number symbols as serial numbers; there was also a Nyx e (as in Log Natural e, which is also irrational). As a result, I had to keep the Greek letter on the clipboard and paste it in whenever I needed it.